Galveston Bay spill not massive, but still challenging

Mar. 27, 2014
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In this March 24, 2014 photo, crews work to clean oil from the shore area in Galveston, Texas. officials said Monday night that changing currents, winds and weather were pushing the oil not only further into the Gulf, but also southwest along Galveston Island, resulting in expanded oil recovery efforts. / Mayra Beltran, AP

by Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

by Rick Jervis, USA TODAY

Editor's Note: This story is one of an occasional "Letter From" series that highlights issues occurring in regions across the USA.

GALVESTON, Texas - On the surface, the recent oil spill into Galveston Bay may appear to be a much smaller, more manageable version of past catastrophic spills.

The amount of oil that seeped into the bay when a container ship collided with a fuel tanker over the weekend - 168,000 gallons - is a fraction of the estimated 100 million gallons that gushed from an underwater well during the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe four years ago. And it's much smaller than the 11 million gallons that spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound during the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

But the spill impacting Galveston Bay and the Houston Ship Channel presents a unique set of challenges that could lead to thornier recovery issues.

For starters, the fuel. The bunker fuel oil - used to propel oceangoing vessels - that seeped into the bay from the barge is thick and viscous, and it sticks to most anything it comes in contact with. In contrast, the Deepwater Horizon oil was a lighter crude that was diluted with chemical dispersants as it traveled more than 70 miles from its source to shorelines in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.

The oil now in Galveston Bay is much thicker, and it's much closer to sensitive wildlife estuaries, says John Pardue, director of the Louisiana Water Resources Research Institute at Louisiana State University, who has studied the Deepwater Horizon spill's effect on coastal Louisiana.

The bunker fuel oil could also clump and sink to the bottom of the bay, where future storms could whip it up and spread it to nearby marshes, he says.

"That's the real danger of these things," Pardue says. "They serve as a reservoir of oil that in the future can be re-mobilized. You just don't know where it is."

Late Thursday, the Coast Guard lifted all restrictions on traffic and reopened the Houston Ship Channel. The channel, which is usually busy, had previously just been open to barge traffic after the spill.

Another glimmer of good news: A significant portion of the oil was heading out of the bay and into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will be at the mercy of hydrocarbon-munching microbes that digest oil particles, making the oil less destructive.

A robust recovery effort, by all accounts, has also helped. Texas recovery officials deal with about 675 spills a year, most only a few dozen gallons, says Greg Pollock, who leads oil recovery efforts for the Texas General Land Office. Within 24 hours of this spill, thousands of feet of boom were deployed to the bay and kept the oil from saturating marshes, he says.

The speedy, efficiently planned work is in part thanks to the Exxon Valdez spill. In the wake of that spill, Texas lawmakers enacted a 1.3% tax on every barrel of crude oil loading or offloading at a Texas port, which poured millions of dollars into the state's oil spill prevention and response efforts, Pollock says.

Thus the federal, state and local effort to track and fight the spill was a well-rehearsed template among players who knew each other before the spill.

"We got tank ships that routinely cross Galveston Bay with 50,000 and 60,000 barrels of oil," or 2 million and 2.5 million gallons, he says. "You always have to be vigilant of cargo like that."

It was also fortunate that the fuel tanker ripped only one tank and did not spill any more of the 900,000 gallons it was carrying, Pollock says. Still, the type of fuel and its proximity to bird habitats and seafood estuaries make it a significant event, he says.

"This is a major spill," Pollock says.

So while it's nowhere near the sheer size of the Deepwater Horizon spill four years ago - which, at its peak, enlisted 1,900 vessels and 4.2 million feet of boom in the recovery effort -- the Galveston Bay spill may still see effects for years to come.